Rising Pressure, page 18
Now that she knew how to adjust her results to look like the wild type system, she felt like she would be ready to try out their cells next week. The bonus was that next week was Thanksgiving, so almost no one would be around. She could work without anyone breathing down her neck or getting in the way. She had overheard most of the lab members discussing their plans for the holiday and knew that no one was staying past Wednesday morning. The department even had a little Thanksgiving luncheon planned for 11:00 a.m. that day. Anthony had told her that people usually eat and run.
Laina was still reviewing her experimental setup when she heard Addison coming down the hall. The woman’s heels made a distinct clicking sound when she walked that was undeniable. Sure enough, when she looked up at the door, Addison walked in.
“I just wanted to let everyone know that it’s fine to take off early next Wednesday. The university is technically closed from Thursday through Sunday, but they will send out an email mid-morning on Wednesday announcing early release or something to that effect. My son Martin’s school is off all week, so he’s going to be spending time here or with my husband Ryan. He’ll be in my office the majority of his time here. If anyone needs me to take care of their cells over the weekend, just let me know. I’ll be coming in on Friday morning for just a bit while my family is out Black Friday shopping.”
“I can take care of mine. I’m not planning on taking much time off next week.”
“Do you have someone to celebrate the holiday with, Laina? You’re more than welcome to join our family.” Addison offered.
“That’s so kind of you. Actually, Anthony and Juan told me about a celebration that the postdocs and grad students put on together for anyone who doesn’t have their own plans. I’m going to join that one.”
“Great. I’m glad you won’t have to celebrate alone. Anyone else? Happy to have anyone join us.”
“I’ll take you up on the offer to do my tissue culture.” Anthony grinned.
“I’m not doing tissue culture right now, so you don’t need to check on mine. I’ll probably start cells up again after Christmas. Getting all my binding studies finished first.” Becky responded.
“Okay. In case you missed the email, the department is requesting desserts from anyone willing to do some baking—or buying for Wednesday. No obligation, of course. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of food as usual. Laina, the meal is held in the big conference room down the hall.”
“I can show her where it is.” Anthony offered. He barely caught Juan rolling his eyes behind his desk, but didn’t mention it.
“Perfect. I’ll be in my office if you need me.” She turned around and walked away.
“If you have a minute, I can show you where that room is. You’ve probably walked past it a dozen times already.” Anthony said to Laina.
“I just need to run to the ladies’ room really quick and then I’m free. See you in a minute.” She responded. Anthony watched her walk away.
Juan cleared his throat, breaking Anthony’s stare. “What?” He asked, putting his hands in the air. He glanced at Becky and Eleanor to see if they were watching. Becky was busy with her notebook and if Eleanor was paying attention, she wasn’t making it obvious.
Juan peeked his head around his desk. “We’re all going to the Thanksgiving meal. Do you really need to give her a private tour of how to get there a week in advance?” He whispered.
“Are you jealous? Is that why you keep riding me for trying to be nice to her?”
Juan rolled his eyes. “Jealous? No. I’m married, fool. I just hate to see you looking after her like a lovesick puppy. She’s an adult. She doesn’t need her hand held by you or anyone else.”
Sounds a lot like jealous to me. Anthony thought. “Forgive me for being kind. I’ll try to cut back in the future.” With that, Juan got up from his desk and walked over to where Becky was making notations in her lab notebook.
Laina stuck her head in the doorway, “I’m back and ready for my tour.”
Anthony wondered if she’d really left at all when she used the word tour, but shook the thought from his mind. Juan was just making him paranoid. “Great. It’s over on the north side of our floor.” He said, pointing down the hallway.
“Does Addison always cover for the lab on holidays?”
“More or less. Sometimes Eleanor will, but she usually has a big family gathering for Thanksgiving, so that’s probably why Dr. Fish is coming in.”
“I’m kind of surprised that she doesn’t want to go shopping with her family. They seem pretty close-knit.”
Anthony laughed. “One thing you’ll learn about Dr. Fish is that she hates shopping. Her youngest son does too, but he’s half-addicted to video games and knows there are great deals to be had that day. Plus, she’ll only be here for an hour or two at most.”
“I figured that she would come on Saturday instead, especially since her kids won’t have school and everything.”
“She rarely comes in on a Saturday. She goes biking with her youngest nearly every Saturday morning. They basically have a race to the top of this hill every week.”
“You sure know a lot about her family.” Laina cocked her head at him in curiosity.
“I don’t know what the lab you came from is like, but Dr. Fish has regular lab gatherings outside of work. We’re kind of an extended family. Plus, Martin—that’s her youngest—has had to come to work with her a few times when he doesn’t have school. Juan and I both know him pretty well. I’ve been with Dr. Fish for—” he paused, not wanting her to know that he had been a graduate student far longer than most,”—a while, so it’s easy to learn about both Dr. Fish and Eleanor’s families.”
“A while, huh?” Laina pursed her lips at Anthony in a teasing manner. “Taking the scenic route through grad school?”
Anthony blushed. “Something like that.” He cleared his throat. “Here’s the conference room. It’s probably locked right now or I’d show you around. The doors will be open for the meal though. Are you going to bring a dessert?”
“I don’t know. I guess I have about a week to decide. I’m not really much of a chef or a baker, so I would probably bring a store-bought pie if I brought something. How about you?”
“I always bring some pumpkin pie. It’s almost impossible to mess that up.” He said as they walked back to the lab.
“Well, I will look forward to sampling that, Mr. Wydrow.” She said and licked her lips.
Anthony felt himself blushing again and tried to calm his emotions before his whole face was red. They had just reached the lab door and he didn’t want Juan to see. “Thanks. It’s usually a fun celebration. Some of our international students and postdocs will bring a cultural dish to share too. We have some multi-talented folks in our department.” He cringed when the word folks left his mouth. What was he, an eighty-five-year-old grandpa?
Laina smiled. “Thanks again for the tour, Anthony. I appreciate it.” She walked over to her desk and picked up her notebook.
Anthony was about to sit down and boot up his computer again when he saw Juan peek his head around the computer again. “Was it hot in the conference room?”
“What? No. It was locked. We didn’t even go in.”
“It’s just, your face looks a little flushed, like maybe it was hot.” He grinned.
“Hilarious.” Anthony hissed back.
Neither man noticed Laina watching them smugly from the corner of her eye.
CHAPTER 53
Laina called Emmitt on Monday evening to see what he thought about the graphs she had emailed him. She knew he might still be grumpy from the conversation over the weekend, but needed to know if he wanted her to make further adjustments to the work. He picked up on the first ring.
“I looked at your graphs.”
She waited for him to continue, but he was silent.
“And? Did you send them to Apothecom?” She asked even though she knew he hadn’t. She had checked his tracker when she got home and knew that he’d looked at her email but that he didn’t do anything with the data.
“If I send this, we’re setting a precedent—”
“The precedent is already set, Emmitt. If we can’t get a similar signal from what everyone thinks is the same, wild type channel, then there is no point in sending anything else. They will know that we’re either A---incompetent or B—invalid or worse, C—fraudulent. This has to match or it’s all irrelevant.”
Emmitt ran his fingers through his hair. Damnit. He knew she was right, but he’d never actually fudged data before. “You’re right. Of course, it has to match. I don’t like doing it this way. I’ve never fudged data like this.”
“Oh, come on, Emmitt. Like what you’ve actually done is somehow better. You said it yourself, we need Apothecom to get behind this if we’re going to get our drug therapy on the market. You have a successful lab, but you could never fund this on your own.”
“I know. I know! Fine. I’ll send it over tonight and let you know when I hear from them. I already have the screening form typed up. Their admin sent me a template to follow when we first started interfacing with them.”
Laina had seen the template, but Emmitt didn’t know that. “Good to be proactive. How long does it usually take them to respond?”
“My contact usually responds quickly, but he’ll have to run this by his team. I’m guessing they will allow us to start recruiting volunteers for the study, but say that the timeline for it is TBD pending the rest of our results.”
“Seems reasonable. I’m running the experiment again this week. Next week is Thanksgiving, so I’ll basically have the lab to myself. I can play around with some of the settings without anyone observing. Assuming I can repeat this in a way that won’t make Addison suspicious, I’ll send all of it to both of you on Friday. I’ll get our own cells up and running over the holiday.”
“Okay, but send it to me first. It’s not that I don’t trust you; I just want to be doubly sure that nothing looks falsified with what you’ve done.”
“Fine. I’ll be in touch.” She ended the call.
CHAPTER 54
Rather than stress Anthony out by looking over his shoulder, Addison stayed out of his way on Thursday. She had already told him that regardless of his results, he had to present it at lab meeting on Friday morning. Maybe someone else would have an idea of where he’d gotten off track. She kept to her office all day, catching up on email and getting ready for her meeting with Becky that afternoon.
When she arrived on Friday morning, she had an email from Laina waiting in her inbox. At least Laina was able to get her experiment to work. Addison thought as she opened the attachments. Laina had basically repeated Anthony’s control experiments. It was a necessary step before using their own cells. She needed to show that she could replicate the process before testing a new system. Addison clicked through Laina’s graphs and thought they all looked good. It gave her hope that Anthony’s experiment had gone smoothly too. Maybe everything was back on track after a brief hiatus last week. She put her computer to sleep and grabbed a notebook and pen to take notes at lab meeting.
When she arrived, Anthony was already hooking up his laptop to the projector. She couldn’t tell if he was anxious or excited and could hardly keep from asking him if he’d worked out the kinks from last week. Soon, everyone else arrived and he pulled up his power point presentation.
“Well, everyone, here we are again.” He said as he started the presentation. Addison blinked when he pulled up his first graph. It wasn’t at all what she expected. The signal was much higher and the slope of the response was different too. What the hell? She thought. Our lab newbie made this work yesterday and he’s blundering yet another experiment?
“I’m not sure what went wrong, but Dr. Fish wanted me to show you my results regardless of how confusing they are.” Addison heard someone choke on their beverage, but didn’t look to see who it was. She still couldn’t believe that Anthony was spinning his wheels again.
“I have run these control experiments at least one hundred times before and I have never gotten results like this. If anyone has any idea of what I’m doing wrong, please, I’m begging, enlighten me.” His shoulders sagged.
The other two PIs asked the same questions that Juan and Addison had already asked. No one had any new ideas of how his experiment was so different. They all agreed that it was almost like he was doing a completely different experiment. The meeting ended earlier than usual since no one else had anything new to offer. Addison knew that Anthony was frustrated and didn’t want to berate him for it. She sat down with him after everyone else left to brainstorm a solution.
“I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think you need to thaw new cells and try again in two weeks. You weren’t going to do an experiment next week anyway with the holiday taking up half of the week.”
Anthony ran his fingers through his hair. “I can’t imagine that it’s the cells though. They worked just fine two weeks ago.”
“Well, you amplified your DNA again recently, right? Did you check it to make sure it didn’t rearrange or something?”
His shoulders slumped further. He never did the extra intermediate steps unless he absolutely had to. “No. I just assumed—” He bit his lip. “I’ll check it this afternoon. If it’s wrong, then I’ll redo that again at the beginning of the week.”
Addison nodded. “Okay, hopefully it’s just something simple like that. I know you’re frustrated. We’re going to get this back on track. This is our bread-and-butter experiment. I could do it in my sleep if I had to. We’ll figure it out. Don’t worry.”
She left him to gather up his things and shut down the projector. She hated seeing him so dejected even though she was feeling the same way. How in the world could his experiment have gone so haywire when Laina’s was close to an exact replica of what he usually does?
Addison stopped by the lab to see if Becky had heard back from any of her potential committee members. Everyone except Laina was at their desks when she walked in. She walked over to Becky’s bench.
“Any update on the committee?”
“Yes! I am just waiting for one more confirmation and then I’ll have my five-member team.” She smiled. “Also, my binding assay went really well yesterday. Do you have a minute to look at it with me?”
Addison pulled up a free chair and sat down next to Becky. They discussed her next steps and the possible direction she could take based on her preliminary results. It was encouraging to see Becky so excited about her project. When she got up to go back to her office, she realized that Laina still wasn’t back.
“Has anyone seen Laina?”
“She said that she had to take a phone call from her mom and left straight from lab meeting. I’m not sure if she’s coming back or not.” Eleanor said.
“Hmm. Hopefully, everything is okay. Still on for lunch today?”
Eleanor nodded. “Looking forward to it.”
Addison smiled and thought, “Are you, though?”
CHAPTER 55
After lab meeting ended, Laina rushed out of the building with her phone, mumbling some sort of excuse about her mom calling. If they only knew! She thought. She dialed Emmitt as soon as she was out of the building and willed him to answer even though it was still relatively early on the west coast.
“Laina? I wasn’t expecting a call from you this morning.”
“We might have a problem.”
“Just one?” He said awkwardly, even though inside he felt panicked.
“I think that dweeb Anthony might have snatched our channel construct.”
“What?! How is that possible. It’s locked in the freezer except for when you’re using it.”
Laina sighed. “On Tuesday last week, I had just pulled all my samples to thaw on ice when that fool from the admin office called to tell me that my new fob was ready. He said that I had to come sign for it right then or I wouldn’t get it. No one but Eleanor was in the lab at that point, so I literally ran down the stairs to get it. Unfortunately, the admin guy was super chatty as though I might be interested in giving him the time of day and it took way longer than it should have for me to get the fob from him. By the time I got back up to the lab, Anthony was in the tissue culture hood doing his own transfection.”
“That doesn’t mean that he took the construct. I don’t understand.”
“Okay, you know how he has to give lab meeting every week?”
“Yes.”
“Well, just now in lab meeting he put up his results from yesterday and his control runs look just like mine.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean that he took the construct. Maybe this is good news. Maybe something else is different in the lab and the issues you have been having getting our channel to behave like the wild type are related to his issues.”
“Or maybe he stole my DNA construct and won’t admit it.”
“I don’t think we can safely jump to that conclusion yet. Give it another week and let’s see if the results line out on their own. If we’re in the same place at this point next week, then we can brainstorm about how to mitigate this.”
“Mitigate? Are you fu—”
“Easy, Laina. You must keep your temper in control.”
“Thanks for the tip, Captain America. This could blow up in our faces. What if they sequence it? What then, Sherlock?”
